Greek and Roman Art and Architecture

About

Greece and Rome are usually taken together because Roman art grew so directly out of Greek models, yet each brought something the other lacked. Greek sculptors, from the Archaic youths of the 6th century BC to the Classical bronzes of the 5th, worked out how a standing body shifts its weight, and Polykleitos's Doryphoros (about 440 BC) served as a model of proportion. Most such bronzes are lost and are known through Roman marble copies. Architects refined the Doric, Ionic and Corinthian orders on temples of cut stone.

Rome admired and collected Greek work but also prized blunt, lined portraits of its leading citizens, and it built with concrete, arches and vaults on a new scale, as in the coffered dome of the Pantheon (about 125 AD). Walls at Pompeii keep painted gardens and illusionistic architecture, and Trajan's Column winds upward with campaign scenes. Look for traces of colour: marble statues and temples were once brightly painted.